If you wanted to explore the idea of control markets, how would you go about doing it?
I don’t understand the difference between control markets and regular markets well enough to answer this question. As near as I can tell (which admittedly isn’t very far; I have a hard time understanding your writing), you’ve independently derived the idea of paying people based on performance metrics, with a dash of prediction markets thrown in for spice. There’s a fair amount of literature on both of those already.
Sorry if I am unclear. I tend to communicate with computers more than humans, where you just need a specification and the implications are derived. I should learn that people don’t tend to work like that....
Perhaps this will help:
In prediction markets people predict facts about the world they have little influence over.
In control markets each Actor predict how well Stakeholders will evaluate them, if that Actor is given control of certain part of an organisation. This prediction is represented by a bid of funge (an internal currency). Other Actors don’t make predictions about that, but upon their own performance. There is no concept of odds that normally go along with prediction markets.
So for example, let us say we have a mailing list resource. Gavin and Brett both want control of the resource. It normally gets a funge feeback of 314. Gavin thinks he has a great idea to reduce the frequency of mailings and can get a feedback score of 360 so bids 200. Brett has no such great ideas so bids his usual 150. So Gavin will bid higher than Brett, but he will only pay what Brett thinks it is worth (due to the auction system chosen), so should make a profit. If Gavin’s idea does less well than he thought he will lose funge overall.
There are lots of potentially interesting things I am glossing over here, things like internal resources, e.g. IT systems. Let us say this is being bid over by Bob and Jim. Bob wins. Bob then gets paid funge by people like Gavin, rather than getting an external performance review. If Bob makes a tweak that gets another 50 funge from the mailing list resource for Gavin, then Gavin is incentivized to give say an extra 25 fung to Bob so that Bob can outbid the more incompetent Jim for control of the IT systems and Gavin can ask him to make a different tweak in future.
Most of this isn’t original anyway but derived from work on learning classifiers and the like, so works in computers.
I am a bit loathe to go into too much detail in how it will actually work in practice, a lot depends upon the scale it is being used at. Gavin and Brett may be different teams rather than individuals, for example.
Omit pronouns in favour of specific referents—exempli gratia this
In control markets people predict how well people will evaluate them, if they are given control of part of an organisation
becomes
In control markets people [x] predict how well others [people y] will evaluate the former’s [people x’s] (control market? what you meant by “them” was not clear), if people [x or y (I’ve no idea which party you meant)] are given control of part of an organisation.
I thoroughly searched Google for ‘funge’, and found no results that seem to fit. Please define it, and be specific. If you want to get people interested, you need to tell them what you mean to do; if you are uncomfortable disclosing your idea in public fora to the degree necessary for garnering interest (an ambiguous qualifier, to be sure), then perhaps you might wish to reconsider your approach.
For what its worth, the verb “funge” is what kids these days are funging for phrases like “trades off against”. Some supposed benefits of this verb are that it takes one syllable rather than four, and it explicitly primes for the concept of “fungibility” in a way that highlights how often a tradeoff isn’t being made against two single things, but rather a tradeoff is being considered between some coherent proposal versus a vast array of other possible plans with similar benefits, and partial fractions and/or combinations of such plans, and so on in a vast optimization space that may contain low hanging fruit… even as considering such tradeoffs often runs afoul of sacredness heuristics.
I defined funge in my control market article which I linked to. I was a bit hasty making that comment. I’ll edit it to match the nomenclature of that article.
If you want to get people interested, you need to tell them what you mean to do; if you are uncomfortable disclosing your idea in public fora to the degree necessary for garnering interest (an ambiguous qualifier, to be sure), then perhaps you might wish to reconsider your approach.
I wish for Control Markets (and experimenting with alternative organizational structures in general) to be part of the zeitgeist. This needs prominent real world examples of its use, which in turn needs experiments with the market and a platform for easy usage of a market. Being a market it needs participants in order to experiment with it. I am currently trying to figure out how to get participants.
I think I need to create a youtube video to explain how it might work. Linking to an article seemed to be TL;DR.
Create a basic multi-player browser game (simpler than the MS Hearts interface), then ask for people to play it. Make the game robust enough to test your ideas, yet simple enough that participants can quickly learn the rules and play the game properly—a condition that still allows for great complexity, depending upon the participants.
Run many trials, contrast the results of the games with your predictions, and revise or discard your hypothesis as necessary. Slowly introduce confounds into your game to test its real-world viability. Ultimately run a long-term game (a couple of weeks or so) in a real world setting as a mock trial. Scale up from there.
In other words, experiment. Prove the feasibility of the idea then build around it. Perhaps the above isn’t even necessary; try your best to falsify the idea with the least possible amount of resources, I believe ’twas recommended. The above suggests one manner in which that may be accomplished.
I had suspected you were a sock of someone who had gone to one of CFAR’s rationality workshops, and had decided to surreptitiously play the “Be Specific”/”Pitch an Idea to..Paul Graham?” game on LW (perhaps for fun, or to see if anyone would catch on, or as a way to run a “real-world” exercise?)
Then I checked your username, and saw you had 1000+ karma, which probably negates the theory that you are a sock, but doesn’t necessarily negate the theory that you are playing the Be Specific game with us....
I’ve not been to CFAR, it is a bit too far. Mostly I’ve no idea what types of organizations people would actually want to join, not being overly enamoured with organizations myself. But I need bodies to test my theories about organizations....
I don’t understand the difference between control markets and regular markets well enough to answer this question. As near as I can tell (which admittedly isn’t very far; I have a hard time understanding your writing), you’ve independently derived the idea of paying people based on performance metrics, with a dash of prediction markets thrown in for spice. There’s a fair amount of literature on both of those already.
Sorry if I am unclear. I tend to communicate with computers more than humans, where you just need a specification and the implications are derived. I should learn that people don’t tend to work like that....
Perhaps this will help:
In prediction markets people predict facts about the world they have little influence over.
In control markets each Actor predict how well Stakeholders will evaluate them, if that Actor is given control of certain part of an organisation. This prediction is represented by a bid of funge (an internal currency). Other Actors don’t make predictions about that, but upon their own performance. There is no concept of odds that normally go along with prediction markets.
So for example, let us say we have a mailing list resource. Gavin and Brett both want control of the resource. It normally gets a funge feeback of 314. Gavin thinks he has a great idea to reduce the frequency of mailings and can get a feedback score of 360 so bids 200. Brett has no such great ideas so bids his usual 150. So Gavin will bid higher than Brett, but he will only pay what Brett thinks it is worth (due to the auction system chosen), so should make a profit. If Gavin’s idea does less well than he thought he will lose funge overall.
There are lots of potentially interesting things I am glossing over here, things like internal resources, e.g. IT systems. Let us say this is being bid over by Bob and Jim. Bob wins. Bob then gets paid funge by people like Gavin, rather than getting an external performance review. If Bob makes a tweak that gets another 50 funge from the mailing list resource for Gavin, then Gavin is incentivized to give say an extra 25 fung to Bob so that Bob can outbid the more incompetent Jim for control of the IT systems and Gavin can ask him to make a different tweak in future.
Most of this isn’t original anyway but derived from work on learning classifiers and the like, so works in computers.
I am a bit loathe to go into too much detail in how it will actually work in practice, a lot depends upon the scale it is being used at. Gavin and Brett may be different teams rather than individuals, for example.
(Edited for clarity)
Advice on writing for clarity:
Omit pronouns in favour of specific referents—exempli gratia this
becomes
I thoroughly searched Google for ‘funge’, and found no results that seem to fit. Please define it, and be specific.
If you want to get people interested, you need to tell them what you mean to do; if you are uncomfortable disclosing your idea in public fora to the degree necessary for garnering interest (an ambiguous qualifier, to be sure), then perhaps you might wish to reconsider your approach.
For what its worth, the verb “funge” is what kids these days are funging for phrases like “trades off against”. Some supposed benefits of this verb are that it takes one syllable rather than four, and it explicitly primes for the concept of “fungibility” in a way that highlights how often a tradeoff isn’t being made against two single things, but rather a tradeoff is being considered between some coherent proposal versus a vast array of other possible plans with similar benefits, and partial fractions and/or combinations of such plans, and so on in a vast optimization space that may contain low hanging fruit… even as considering such tradeoffs often runs afoul of sacredness heuristics.
I defined funge in my control market article which I linked to. I was a bit hasty making that comment. I’ll edit it to match the nomenclature of that article.
I wish for Control Markets (and experimenting with alternative organizational structures in general) to be part of the zeitgeist. This needs prominent real world examples of its use, which in turn needs experiments with the market and a platform for easy usage of a market. Being a market it needs participants in order to experiment with it. I am currently trying to figure out how to get participants.
I think I need to create a youtube video to explain how it might work. Linking to an article seemed to be TL;DR.
Create a basic multi-player browser game (simpler than the MS Hearts interface), then ask for people to play it. Make the game robust enough to test your ideas, yet simple enough that participants can quickly learn the rules and play the game properly—a condition that still allows for great complexity, depending upon the participants.
Run many trials, contrast the results of the games with your predictions, and revise or discard your hypothesis as necessary. Slowly introduce confounds into your game to test its real-world viability. Ultimately run a long-term game (a couple of weeks or so) in a real world setting as a mock trial. Scale up from there.
In other words, experiment. Prove the feasibility of the idea then build around it. Perhaps the above isn’t even necessary; try your best to falsify the idea with the least possible amount of resources, I believe ’twas recommended. The above suggests one manner in which that may be accomplished.
I had suspected you were a sock of someone who had gone to one of CFAR’s rationality workshops, and had decided to surreptitiously play the “Be Specific”/”Pitch an Idea to..Paul Graham?” game on LW (perhaps for fun, or to see if anyone would catch on, or as a way to run a “real-world” exercise?)
Then I checked your username, and saw you had 1000+ karma, which probably negates the theory that you are a sock, but doesn’t necessarily negate the theory that you are playing the Be Specific game with us....
I’ve not been to CFAR, it is a bit too far. Mostly I’ve no idea what types of organizations people would actually want to join, not being overly enamoured with organizations myself. But I need bodies to test my theories about organizations....
Any links to descriptions of the game?